finnishrogue: andletforsakendidodie:thesaddestchorusgirlintheworld:inmilkwood:russiacore:parts of an
finnishrogue: andletforsakendidodie:thesaddestchorusgirlintheworld:inmilkwood:russiacore:parts of an amazing article you can read here: https://theoutline.com/post/3151/the-skincare-con-glossier-drunk-elephant-biologique-recherche-p50?zd=1 on the recently spewed hazardous skincare craze and trends. “a blemish seems like a referendum on who you are as a person.” holy sh…most cathartic article ever written. Acne is inevitably a public affliction and in its gnarliest forms can breed shame and low-self-esteem as well as inflamed face nodes. When it’s angry enough, you can’t really hide it. At best, you can turn a red lump into a brown one, and fool people from far away. It makes you feel ugly—I should stop using second-person. It makes me feel ugly. It makes me feel like I’m dirty and I need to be scrubbed raw to be clean again.Enter St. Ives.Hatred breeds violence, self-hatred no less so. If the thing that makes you hate yourself is on your surface, it makes sense to try to scrub your surface away. “It’s like using sandpaper on your face,” one dermatologist said of the St. Ives scrub, in an interview with New York magazine, and I can say from experience it feels that way, too. “If it hurts, it must be working”: my longtime approach to acne treatment.I’d buy the highest possible concentration of benzoyl peroxide or salicylic acid and heap it on my blemishes, taking comfort in the burn. I’d leave the shower with my skin red and stinging from a fresh St. Ives assault and refuse to moisturize afterward, hoping the zits would crumble into dust and I could rebuild my desert face from the ground up. Then of course, there’s the old classic of popping, squeezing, scratching and picking at zits, willing to draw my own blood so long as I can remove the invaders.This self-harming form of warfare is common, Chiu says: “From teenagers to adults, acne is an incredibly frustrating issue, and almost everyone’s first impulse to scrub, pick, and overdry the skin. This then can cause even more irritation, or even worse scarring and discoloration, which feeds into a cycle of worsening acne. Overdrying and irritating the skin sometimes confuses the oil glands and paradoxically makes them more active. ”But the skincare industry itself perpetuates this practice through some of these products that promise purity through violence. Biore pore strips are essentially pieces of paper that you glue to your face and then rip off, yanking out your blackheads (and often taking your hair along with it). One of the slogans on the company’s product page is “Don’t be dirty”—feeding right into my old insecurity. Commercials for rough exfoliating scrubs tend to have a woman with already perfect-skin extolling the “deep-clean” and splashing her face with pure blue water. In this old St. Ives commercial I found on YouTube they just drop the bottle into some water, which is weird, and a girl says, “we’re not talking some deep spiritual cleansing—but almost.”Elsewhere, you can find people claiming the pore strips made their pores larger, or irritated their skin. The subreddit r/SkincareAddiction holds particular vitriol for the St. Ives scrub, which some dermatologists say is so abrasive that it can cause small tears in the skin. The subreddit rejoiced in the announcement of Browning and Basile’s lawsuit, as Slate recently reported. It’s hard to find actual studies on the efficacy of specific products, but certainly St. Ives Apricot Scrub and its ilk perpetuate this idea that the best way to get the skin you want is to destroy the skin you have. They facilitate the worst impulses of the frustrated acne-sufferer declaring war on their skin.The marketing of skincare products preys on vulnerability, even if not intentionally, promising that this new product is the one thing that will finally work, that your zits will be gone in time for prom, that your wrinkles will be less noticeable in four weeks. Without a lot of good information out there, it’s no wonder if I and others put our faith in these promises, and overdo it, thinking if it hurts, it must be working.Julie Beck LOUDER I love this post and the message it sends, but a lot of these points are kind of misinformed and out-of-date in the sense that if you have been following the skincare “community” or whatever you want to call it, cult would also do, during the last 10 years or so, absolutely nobody has been thinking St. Ives products should be anywhere near your face or that hurting/explicitly hating your skin is a sign of progress. I became really into skincare a few years ago (read: obsessed to the extent of buying several hundreds of products in the span of two-three years) precisely BECAUSE I was told scrubbing my skin with harsh products was just a way to make things worse, and because I was finally able to find actual dermatologists/product chemists/estheticians making product recommendations online. I did it because I was actually learning things about my skin’s biochemistry and finally understood what ingredients were used in each product and what they were for and where they came from. I did it because I wanted to understand the latest, cutting-edge scientific research: avoid fragrance, physical scrubbing, essential oils and misleading advertising, such as the claim that topically applied collagen does something for you or that the words “natural” or “clean” actually mean something.I wasn’t obsessed because I wanted to look eternally beautiful no matter the cost, I was obsessed because I thought I was just trying to find the actual recipe for proper products that do what they’re supposed to, aka take care of my largest organ. Much like I wanted to buy good vitamins to maintain my general health, or find a good pillow to sleep well with.Or so I thought. In reality, my beauty routine still took a lot of natural resources, effort, energy, money and practice. Countless trial-and-errors and stress about products expiring, being left open or unprotected from oxidation/light/warmth. Countless of products thrown away and wasted because I couldn’t use them up before they went bad. Countless hours of me teaching myself what each ingredient meant, even though I was no chemist and would never become one, and technically I shouldn’t have to be an expert in a field in order to just… protect my skin from excessive damage. And for what? Regardless of how I wanted to redefine my relationship with skincare, clear, glassy and “perfect” baby skin STILL signified health, so every time my skin pushed out new pimples or started looking even slightly red, I thought I was failing. Every time I looked at myself from the mirror and told myself I was just doing this for my own health, I was zooming in even harder, trying to find the tiniest flaws, discoloration, hyperpigmentation, whiteheads, blackheads, sebum, hairs, wrinkles… and trying to address each and every one of these issues. Which of course, due to the smart marketing strategies in this industry, meant I would just keep buying more and more products. I thought I was introducing myself to a relaxing (science-proven) moment of self-care and introspection, but in reality I was just staring at myself from the mirror for hours, being disappointed of the expensive products, and eventually myself. My face stopped being a face and became a project, or more like a minefield where I was moving around with calculated, careful movements to “disarm” my different problem zones with different chemical ingredients. And although some of the products I used surely did help… It didn’t make me satisfied, because it didn’t change the fact that I wasn’t doing this for myself anyway. Using skincare extensively would mean “looking healthy”, but looking healthy meant looking young and wrinkle-free. And looking young and wrinkle-free would mean looking beautiful. And looking beautiful would mean being attractive, acceptable or decent in front of others. And then it would circle right back to all the misogynistic expectations people would place on me, regardless of how I had thought the phrases “doing what’s healthy for you” and “doing only what has been proven by science” would somehow change the entire sentiment. I still own a lot of skincare products and I am determined to use them up. But I now understand, especially after the corona outbreak and me being able to live in my home without even walking past a mirror the whole day, that I do not have to look like anything. I do not have to look young, or “healthy”, nor do I have to associate these things with each other. I do not have to associate beauty with youth, but even less I have to associate myself with the word beauty, as it is literally a pointless, nonsensical and discriminatory word in the first place. And I do not have to buy expensive products that destroy the environment just to send a message to others that “I am living my life healthily”. I do not owe this information to anyone, as my health is my own concern only. In the end, only I exist in my own body, and only I need to feel good in it. And feeling good and looking good are two totally different things. My mirror is not me. -- source link